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Fall Crop

Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand. This is especially true in the case of liberal Democrats—they may be a dime a dozen in New York City, but up here they are so rare that children can bring one in for show-and-tell at school.

Another big difference is the lawn signs. I grew up in a town in Ohio that didn’t permit lawn signs, so I had never seen them until I moved out West after college, and then lost track of them again when I moved to New York City. I had sort of forgotten they even existed until moving upstate. Now, as far as I can tell, the biggest fall crop in Columbia County is political lawn signage, flourishing on road shoulders and medians and right-of-ways as well as front lawns. They drive me crazy, mostly because they look so trashy. They also stick around like ragweed burrs for months after the polls have closed.

More differences: Upstate, many people show up to vote in hunting clothes. They are not being ironic; it’s just that they are either on their way home from or on their way to go hunting. Also, in my town at least, voters are usually offered candy when they sign in (correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember getting candy when I voted in Manhattan). Conversation in line is clearly location-specific. This morning, as we lined up to vote at our tiny town hall, my next-door neighbor was kibitzing with the election supervisor about farming. I caught bits of their conversation while the other supervisor was trying to explain the new, slightly baffling voting machines.

“You’ve got the pasture, don’t you?” my neighbor was saying to the supervisor.

“I’ve got the pasture,” the supervisor answered.

“Well, then, you’ve got the pasture, so that’s that,” my neighbor summed up. Then he stood up, put his hunting cap back on, and took his turn to vote.